A parole board denied granting freedom to a former prosecutor who murdered his wife, Santa Cruz County District Attorney Jeffrey Rosell announced Friday.

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Kenneth Donney has served 21 years of his 16-years-to-life prison sentence for killing Nina Leibman in October of 1995.

Leibman was a professor at UC Santa Cruz and Santa Clara University.

The former federal prosecutor stabbed his wife 29 times in the study of their Santa Cruz house while they were arguing over a pending divorce, prosecutors said.

The couple's 7-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter were awake in their beds down the hall from the study, and could hear the brutal murder happening, prosecutors said.

The son told the parole board that he could hear his mother crying and saying, "I don't want to die," while his father screamed, "You should have thought of that before."

Donney's son said he would fear for his life if his father was released from prison.

Santa Cruz prosecutors David Sherman and Michael Mahan traveled to Stockton State Prison to argue against parole for Donney. They stated that he should be denied parole because he has never admitted the truth; nor has he demonstrated rehabilitation during his incarceration.

While denying the 70-year-old inmate's request for parole, the parole board cited his lack of insight into what he did and how it affected his family.

During past hearings with the parole board, Donney insisted that he had no memory of stabbing his wife, and that he must have been in a dissociated mental state at the time of the murder. He later said that therapy helped recover his memory, and he remembered acting out of self-defense.

An autopsy noted that there were many defensive wounds on Leibman's hands. The coroner concluded that she was repeatedly stabbed and beaten in the head with a blunt object.

Rosell said Donney poses a continuing risk to public safety, saying, "The District Attorney’s Office will continue to be active in the parole process and use all reasonable resources to make sure that dangerous people are kept behind bars."